Scottsboro Revisited?

An Alabama rape trial awakens old hatreds

Tommy Lee Hines, 25, was arrested last May when a woman stenographer complained that he had been peeping into her office window in Decatur, Ala. (pop. 43,000). In the patrol car, a policeman reminded the black prisoner of his Miranda right to a court-appointed lawyer, and Hines waived that right. The police then began questioning Hines about three unsolved rape cases. "How many women did you rape, two or three?" asked one officer. "Three," said Hines.

Last week Hines sat silent and motionless as he went on trial for "forcibly ravishing" one of three white women he has been accused of raping. In addition to the police version of Hines' story, which included his escape in a car, two of the three victims identified him at a preliminary hearing. The trouble is that Hines, who had never been in trouble before, has a mental age of six years and an IQ in the 30s. Says his father, Richard Hines: "They had Tommy driving a car. That boy can't even ride a bicycle."

Decatur has a past. The celebrated Scottsboro boys case of the 1930s--in which eight of nine black youths were sentenced to death on highly dubious charges of raping two white women--was retried there and led to four new convictions. Decatur peacefully integrated its schools and public facilities in the 1960s, but as soon as Hines was indicted in June, racial tension began rising. Demonstrators from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference appeared in front of the city hall and put up tents on the grass. Hines' arrest was "a setup," said the Rev. R.B. Cotton-reader, a leader of the S.C.L.C. "Decatur was being pressed for an arrest and conviction for those rapes." Then came the Ku Klux Klan, which set up its own tents. On Aug. 14 it burned a cross before the civic center.

Defense Attorney Henry Sanders Mims asked that the trial be moved to a less hostile place. The alternative, Cullman, 30 miles away, was not much of an improvement. Only about 1% of its 14,200 people are black, so it was no surprise that the nine men and three women selected for the jury were all white. On the eve of the trial, Hines supporters began a protest march from Decatur to Cullman. They were stopped at the Cullman town line by police and jeering Klansmen. Twenty-three blacks were arrested.

Soon afterward, Mims entered a plea of not guilty for Hines. The victim again accused him, but Mims "called in a psychologist, a teacher and an administrator from the special schools for the mentally disabled where Hines had been enrolled for several years. Hines, they said, cannot count to three or name the days of the week in order. Jack Anderson, professor of psychiatry at the University of Alabama School of Medicine, testified that any confession Hines made to police should be considered suspect.

As the trial proceeded, the threat of violence was never far. Two bomb scares emptied the courtroom, and police confiscated several automatic weapons. Defense lawyers monitored CB radio conversations that called for the jury to "hang the nigger." Cullman Mayor Bob McGluckin vowed that the authorities could maintain order. Said he: "We have a peaceful, law-abiding community. We do not like outside people coming in and exerting a detrimental influence."

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